The conference is the culmination of a series of undergraduate workshops and creative writing seminars, advanced study seminars for graduate students and faculty, and performances by artists and poets honoringAnzaldúa this year as part of the campus’s 50th anniversary celebration.

Titled The Feminist Architecture of Gloria E. Anzaldúa: New Translations, Crossings, and Pedagogies in Anzaldúan Thought, the two-day scholarly event is free and open to the public.

Anzaldúa was a lecturer in the Women’s Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz (now Feminist Studies), where she influenced a generation of students, offering such courses as Autohistorias and Women of Color in the United States, before her untimely death in 2004.

Anzaldúa was also a graduate student in literature at UCSC and had nearly completed her Ph.D. at the time of her death; she was awarded her Ph.D. posthumously.

Anzaldúa drew inspiration from an array of altars she created in her home near Lighthouse Point. The altars form the heart of her archives, which now reside in McHenry Library’s Special Collections.

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Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa — poet, philosopher, and critical scholar — founded, wrote, and encouraged a transformative body of writing and scholarship, with generative influences on critical race, feminist, queer, and decolonizing ways of knowing. Importantly for UCSC, Anzaldúa was a vital presence on our campus for over twenty years, and her legacy is a profound part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the campus.